Connecting knowledge semantically across domains (disciplines - domains of application - specialization languages) and abstraction levels (concepts - praxis) through systemic interpretation elements / descriptors.
By systemically and semantically marking up and relating different kinds of knowledge, and by enabling navigation within this networked knowledge, collective intelligence can be operationalized and collective action (whether co-operation or co-laboration) enhanced in a way that ensures that intentions, action and the effects they produce can be assessed against each other.
The major objective of the PLAST project is to create a multi-disciplinary community of practice around an open knowledge repository of sustainability and social innovation practices, leveraging pattern languages to make knowledge accessible and reusable across domains, turning knowledge and ‘know-how’ into repeatable results and coherent systemic sustainability outcomes. The key to social innovation is making communities of sustainability practice aware of each other’s solutions and achievements in a language that they can understand, so that successes can be explained, remixed, applied, and evaluated for their effectiveness across domains.
The PLAST project will provide an opensource platform for multi-disciplinary participants to share sustainability knowledge and know-how (in the form of Patterns and Pattern Languages) as ‘shared social objects’, and will organize them in a coherent model of meaningful relationships, socially constructed categories, and system dynamics. It will provide multiple entry points and pathways through collected solutions and practices, to encourage systemic inquiry and collective exploration of adjacent possibilities. It will encourage participants to apply these solutions and practices in new domains and communities, and to monitor the results, by providing the ability to document, discuss and deliberate the intentions and outcomes of systemic interventions. Most importantly, by capturing and analysing the social process of deliberating effective sustainable practices, the platform allows reflexive improvement in the process of transformation itself.
The PLAST project will engage communities of place and practice in facilitated action research, collecting existing pattern languages and creating new ones from practitioners’ experiences. This will be the seed from which communities can create their own repositories, federated into a commons.
We will open up streams to develop in parallel:
- Work processes
- Set of tools
- Semantic / systemic operators (writing systemic stories)
- Orientation engine (using engagement logic heuristics)
We intend to develop a base infrastructure so that work can start with minimal set up / work / learning curve, and to get people / communities to engage, and a set of structuring principles so that the project can scale.
We wish to attract individuals and communities that have a professional / occupational interest in developing the project. Individul / group projects will be federated / aggregated as use cases, using shared semantic and orientation tools to write their own systemic stories.
We will develop PLAST as its own use case: developing patterns for our vision and work processes as open / stigmergetic project that could be applied to other open projects.
We intend to design work processes that enable us to collaboratively maintain PLAST's vision and work processes as a use case of the project, and to co-operatively develop our own operational use cases that will be aggregated in a shared pool of commons knowledge.
- write and maintain this project description and list of resources (mid August to mid September).
- inform and convene our core group of supporters to start evaluating tools and working on work processes (mid September).
- define the PLAST pattern language: how we work, what we do
- Set up / integrate the start tools and work processes so that the project can attract participation and develop organically.
- Semantic database / repository that can be queried by other tools
- Retrieving of individual patterns and building of sequences
- Discussion of patterns individually and in sequence and tracks of discussions
- Orientation (using engagement logics, angles of approach)
- ...
- Semantic wiki (not great for federated, i.e. individual aspect?)
- PatternPedia on Semantic MediaWiki (is there a demo open source version to play with?)
- Smallest Federated wiki (not great for scaling aggregation and co-laboration? participate in Ward Cunningham's video sessions with David & Ksenya)
- Github
- René Reiner's Pattern evolution library (is there a demo open source version to play with?)
- Trello (work flow)
- Slack (work process discussion, integration of notification, simulations/bot?)
- 'Orientation' game / engine based on engagement logics and why/what/how/who framework to be developped
- ...
From which to abstract and synthesize project description and work elements
Conceptual elements
- Presentation Bridging the Systemic and Semantic Spheres ten slides highlight, conceptual summary of the project.
- Logics of Engagement and Action on the repo's wiki two slides framework for orientation / semantic enquiry
- What PLAST does two slides on how PLAST operates in relation to the dimensionalities of engagement in change.
Implementation elements
- The PLAST proposal for CAPS Horizon2020sections 1-3, including work packages.
- First set of systemic interpretation elements used at the Purplsoc conference to share systemic stories. (need to finalize and post report here).
- Collective intelligence is a commons that needs protection and a dedicated language in Spanda Journal, issue on Collective intelligence.
- A Pattern LAnguage for Systemic Transformation (PLAST) - (re)Generative of Commons
- Wiki as Pattern Language by Ward Cunningham. Elaborations on Pattern languages, wiki, and Smallest Federated Wiki.
- Presentation at Purplsoc 2015 Towards a 4th generation pattern language. Highlights on what PLAST does, and how it is operationalized, as a use case for a new generation of pattern languages. Includes more details on the what/how/why framework. As basis for a paper in the proceedings of Purplsoc book.